This CEO, and her company, getting attention in high places

Tracy Gliori, a rare success story in a male-dominated industry, learned her business the hard way.

Gliori is president and CEO of TMI Coatings Inc., an Eagan firm that specializes in sandblasting and painting ridiculously tall structures such as water towers, industrial storage tanks and power-plant stacks, not to mention bridges and other acrophobia-inducing structures.

It does other things now, thanks to Gliori's diversification efforts of the past 10 years, including building restorations and application of industrial coatings. But defying the law of gravity is what made the company's reputation -- and it's the source of one of her most memorable lessons.

It was the 1980s and Gliori, fresh out of college, was an estimator for her father, TMI founder Jim Imre. On one of her bids, which involved coating the interior of a large corn-syrup storage tank owned by Royal Crown Cola, she forgot to include the cost of removing the sand left by the requisite sandblasting.

So she suddenly found herself assigned to help shovel the sand into wheelbarrows and haul it outside for disposal.

"It took two days, and the temperature was way above 90 degrees," Gliori said. "I've never forgotten to include such things in my estimates again."

Gliori, who took control of TMI after her father died in a motorcycle crash in 1996, runs a company that employs 85 people, is licensed to operate in 23 mostly mid-continent states and generated $11 million in 2005 revenue, a 22 percent gain over $9 million in 2004.

In addition to the high-level painting jobs, Gliori has led the company into the application of resinous industrial coatings to plant floors, walls and ceilings, and building restoration work, which includes replacing and tuckpointing brick and block and repairing cracked and eroded concrete.

In the process, the company has embraced the intense and expensive certification process of the Society for Protective Coatings to qualify for complicated jobs that require special rigging and expert personnel. Its client list includes the likes of 3M, Cargill, Caterpillar, Rockwell Collins and the Mall of America.

Gliori calls the work routine, but consider some of the complications involved: For a job coating a water line across the Big Arkansas River in Kansas, the company had to string a series of 40-foot tarps to keep the sandblasting residue from polluting the water.

That's nothing compared with the 110-foot-diameter, 182-foot-tall canvas "skirt" that TMI wrapped around a Golden Valley water tower to contain the lead-based paint that was being removed. Routine, she said.

Despite the training and certification, however, there are dramatic moments -- such as the day in 2002 when the wind entangled a TMI worker in ropes and cables high on the water tower the company was painting at Southdale. Again, it was a routine situation that the workers were equipped to handle, Gliori said.

Even more unusual than the company's uncommon activities is Gliori's success in a business that her husband, Guido Gliori, says might not exactly be Neanderthal, but sure hasn't evolved as far as most industries.

"But she does an excellent job of dealing with the men in a men's business," he said. How?

"She doesn't try to be a good old boy," he said, but instead offers "expertise, service and more competence than anybody else."

He ought to know: Guido is executive vice president of Grazzini Brothers & Co., an Eagan commercial stone contractor, and his wife has beaten him on more than one bid.

Indeed, thanks to what Klein calls her ability to communicate with plant managers and engineers, Gliori is one of the top contributors among TMI's seven-person sales force, accounting for nearly 20 percent of last year's revenue.

"Stay under the radar, remain very professional, businesslike and in control," she said.

An example: While estimating a coatings job on the kill floor of a hog-processing plant in Austin, Minn., she accidentally dropped her pen in a puddle of blood. Then, when she bent down to retrieve it, her hard hat fell into the same mess.

"I was thinking, 'Yuk, where's the wash basin?' " she recalled. But what she did was wipe the blood on the bottom of her lab coat, clamp it back on her head and proceed as though nothing had happened.